Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Concept Of Totality

"It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation
that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism
and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The
category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole
over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took
over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations
of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the
producer from the total process of production, the division of the
process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity
of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who
simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a
profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy
of capitalism. Proletarian science is revolutionary not just
by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois
society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the
category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.

The revolutionary nature of Hegelian dialectics had often
been recognised as such before Marx, notwithstanding Hegel's
own conservative applications of the method. But no one had
converted this knowledge into a science of revolution. It was
Marx who transformed the Hegelian method into what Herzen
described as the 'algebra of revolution'. It was not enough,
however, to give it a materialist twist. The revolutionary principle
inherent in Hegel's dialectic was able to come to the surface
less because of that than because of the validity of the method
itself, viz. the concept of totality, the subordination of every part
to the whole unity of history and thought. In Marx the dialectical
method aims at understanding society as a whole. Bourgeois
thought concerns itself with objects the arise either from the
process of studying phenomena in isolation, or from the division
of labour and specialisation in the different disciplines. It holds
abstractions to 'real' if it is naively realistic, and 'autonomous'
if it is critical."